Fascinating Fact Fridays

In the previous episode of Wings of War, we discussed pigeon-missile madman B.F. Skinner. Today, we’ll explore the equally odd tale of Lytle S. Adams and the rather clever, if not slightly unhinged, Project X-Ray. Lytle S. Adams was an unconventional inventor and dentist from Ohio with a flair for imaginative problem-solving. Known for devising quirky inventions and bold ideas, Adams was the type of person who saw potential in the unusual. In the early 1940s, during a visit to New Mexico’s Carlsbad Caverns, Adams found himself mesmerized by the swarms of bats emerging at dusk. He marveled at their sheer numbers and ability to squeeze into small crevices—a quality that would inspire one of the strangest wartime proposals in history. After witnessing the bats at Carlsbad, it didn’t take long for Adams to come up with a plan to weaponize them. Leveraging his connections to the Roosevelts—he had a personal friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt—Adams outlined his wild idea in a letter to the Wh...

You may have heard oil referred to as liquid gold or about how printer ink is the most valuable liquid in the world (seriously HP, $12,000/gallon for some black goop??? I'm no Marxist, but who wants to seize the means of production with me?) . But I bet you didn’t know about this baby blue liquid that’s become indispensable to modern medicine. No, it's not Cool Blue Gatorade. Stay with me for a moment, dear reader, as we take a seemingly unrelated detour through the life of the American Horseshoe Crab. The horseshoe crab has been around longer than the dinosaurs, outlasting five mass extinctions. Despite its name, it’s not a crab, and it’s a closer relative to spiders than any seafood you’ve seen. With an armored shell and a tail that doubles as a rudder, it looks like a creature from another world. But for millions of years, it’s quietly thrived, feeding on clams and worms in shallow waters, equipped with simple but shockingly efficient biology. Horseshoe crabs begin their liv...

The word "Confederacy" has a complicated history in America. I guess we had some kind of big civil war in the 1860s? I'm not too familiar with the details, but by all accounts it was really not "cash money". What I can tell you for sure though, was that the Confederate States of America was not the first Confederacy in America, not by a long shot. The Iroquois Confederacy, known as the Haudenosaunee, represents one of the oldest and most enduring examples of democratic governance in North America. Established centuries before European settlers arrived, the Confederacy united five Indigenous nations—the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca—under a constitution known as the Great Law of Peace. This alliance later included the Tuscarora, becoming what was known as the Six Nations. The Peacemaker, a legendary figure in Haudenosaunee history, is said to have introduced the Great Law, aiming to end long-standing conflicts among these nations. This foundational...